Lessons from the World Economic Forum in Davos - Cloud Computing’s Global Impact

By Chris Barbin

Last week I had the honor to attend my first World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos as a representative of 2012’s class of WEF Technology Pioneers.  I made my first trip to Switzerland twenty years ago when I was traversing across Europe on a Eurorail Pass armed only with a backpack and $1,500 for the duration. That visit to Switzerland and Europe changed my perspective on life forever by completely opening up the world to me. While the lodging and food were a bit better last week, my Davos experience opened up another chapter for me and an even broader personal perspective.  This time not just a global awareness, but how cloud computing (and hopefully young companies like Appirio) can really make a difference and a global impact in the coming decades.

The conversations in Davos were far reaching, from gender equality to social unrest to (of course) today’s economic challenges, and it was amazing to hear how often technology was brought up in these topics.  As Nick Bilton from the New York Times said in his recent blog, “Even the 102-page program guide made more references to technology and social media than any of the nerdiest Silicon Valley blogs I read daily.”

However, what I found even more surprising was how little true understanding there was around cloud computing. Granted, its still only 4-5% of a $1.5T IT industry, and as CEO of a cloud computing company, I eat, sleep, and breathe that world.  However, it was surprising at a time when CEOs, reporters and investors alike are talking about how “the cloud” will transform IT and even create jobs. I had a number of conversations in Davos with business executives who were already using or exploring cloud computing, but even they were still thinking about it from the private cloud perspective as a way to streamline costs - not a way to do things differently.

The shift to Internet-centric, public cloud technologies has the potential to not only reshape a new generation of industry giants (including Facebook, whose COO Sheryl Sandberg was co-chair and one of the hottest tickets in town), it’s one of the “new models” that will impact the world’s economy in the future which was a major theme of the conference.

Here are two more areas where I think cloud computing could make a huge global impact:

The crowd’s ability to stimulate a new workforce (and economies).  
While cloud computing was less understood, crowdsourcing was a significant topic of discussion. One of my favorite conversations was with the founder and CEO of the Hult Global Case Challenge - a crowdsourcing platform and event that brings together students from around the globe to solve complex social issues.  The cloud is enabling this move to crowdsourcing ideas.

I was also lucky enough to participate in a brainstorming session with Italy’s Minister of Economic Development, Corrado Passera, on bringing technology and innovation to Italy.  With 6 million businesses in the country and 15-24 year olds there facing a 30% unemployment rate, he was looking for creative, disruptive concepts to help stimulate the economy.  We talked about using platforms like our CloudSpokes crowdsourcing development community as an on-ramp for jobs and new skill development.  It was an idea that intrigued Mr. Passera enough to ask us to stay in touch as part of a technology-working group to stimulate innovation in his country, and made me realize the impact that can be had when you combine the power of the cloud AND crowd.

The Millenial’s ability to solve problems in new and innovative ways.  
This year the WEF introduced a new program called The Global Shapers, which includes a group of nearly 100 twenty-to-thirty year olds that have an entrepreneurial track record and are contributing to serving society at large. This is a generation that grew up living “in the cloud”. They tweet rather than email. They live on their phones not their computers. They established organizations like DropBox that serve 50 million people without building out huge workforces like in days past.

I won’t lie. Listening to these edgy and fearless leaders speak at times made me feel like the skeptical and pragmatic old guy, but they are incredibly strong, outspoken and have a unique perspective on the world. They will be able to apply the Internet, social technologies and networked cloud systems in ways that we haven’t even imagined yet.  You only have to look at the Arab Spring to get a glimpse of what’s possible.

Sure, there are a lot of open questions around the cloud’s impact on the global economy - many of which came up in my one-on-one discussions.  Things like what role government regulation will (and should) play in helping or hindering cloud adoption.  Or where the cloud fits within the various security models across the world. Or how local infrastructure and business environments in emerging nations can adapt and mature to support this new way of doing business.

But that’s part of what excites me about this space - it’s still early and we’re still pioneering. There is no question that in our $1.5T industry, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of waste annually - failed projects, under-utilized hardware and software, corporate data centers draining excessive power, and bloated maintenance and services contracts required to make it all work together.  As one C-level tech executive said during one of my industry roundtables “if we don’t innovate with things like the cloud and new business models, we’ll be faced with a crisis similar to what the financial services industry has been through.”  I know personally, I’ll fight incredibly hard with industry partners, governments and forums like the WEF to prevent that from happening.

Davos and the World Economic Forum exceeded all my expectations and I could not be more thankful and feel more fortunate to have been able to attend on behalf of the team at Appirio.

10 Ways to Drive Cloud Adoption: Focus on the User (Part 2)

Beth Chmielowski

My last post described five steps you can take during the strategy and planning phase of a cloud implementation to inform and simplify user adoption. Today’s post is all about the user and the top five ways to prepare and enable them for success.

• Show Them: People who purchase and/or configure the tool are usually a very small subset of those that will use it. These people invest so much time getting the system ready for go live, that they sometimes forget that the majority of the company doesn’t know what is coming. They may not even know anything is coming, or if they do, they may be very nervous about it. Don’t wait for go live. Give people a sneak preview. Think about this as an internal marketing campaign, communicating both the vision as well as the reality today. There are many communications best practices – but if you do nothing else, at least schedule a demo.


• Teach Them: Put together a training plan by audience. There will be multiple stakeholder groups which will have some shared and some unique needs based on how they will be using the new system. Make sure you teach them how to use the new tool within the context of the current or evolving processes they support. A demo helps set expectations, but training is crucial for actual usage. Ideally, training should be a blend of formal training that is hands-on, scenario-base and process-focused (vs. feature/function focused), augmented with agile and social learning options. The laundry list of everything a tool is capable of doing is largely irrelevant to any given user.  Instead, teach them what the tool enables them to do in their role, and how they will be expected to use it.


• Help Them: Help and support have an increasing number of meanings in the technology world. 
• Help them help themselves (Agile Learning):  Provide access to content when people need it in an easy to consume way so it doesn’t disrupt them from the flow of work. Ideally, make that information available from within the context of where they will need it and build it around specific processes. Online help is great for describing buttons and tabs; agile learning content should describe tasks, and those tasks should be specific to the person, the company and the happy path that has been configured for them, not just generic, out of the box flows.
• Help them connect with peers and experts so they can help each other (Social Learning): There will be people that will, whether by nature or by design, become evangelists for the system or experts with the processes that the system supports. Help people find each other and work together via collaboration and social learning tools. They are increasingly being built into or integrated with enterprise systems, so think though how you want to take advantage of those tools.
• Help them when they’re stuck (IT Support): Make sure people know who to contact for help when they’re stuck, and how. Make sure people are available to provide that help, especially around go live. Also, have periodic checkpoints to review the most common issues and see if there’s anything that can be done within the technology itself to eliminate the problem.


• Convince Them: If you’re expecting people to use the new system as part of their job, use it as part of your job. Management should set the example with their own behavior and drive people to the system whenever possible. For example, if you are using a new CRM system, run your sales calls from the tool. If sales reps are calling numbers that are different from what they’re tracking in the system, hold them accountable. If managers and leadership continually place value on the system and the data, users will be compelled to do so as well.


• Empower Them: Finally, give users a mechanism for suggesting improvements. One of the many benefits we hear from line of business owners is that cloud-based technology gives them greater control over their own systems, rather than being dependant on IT for updates and releases. Not to imply that IT people are a barrier, however it’s not unusual for them to be an overworked team with a large backlog doing their best to balance multiple priorities. Cloud-based systems let them divest of some of the more tactical and ostensibly lower-value tasks such as tweaking fields or workflows by giving the maintenance back to the line of business. This is a win-win, since those minor tweaks may actually result in major wins in terms of adoption. And, given the ease of maintenance the Cloud offers, the line of business is able to prioritize and execute on those changes rather quickly.  Take advantage of that. Think about the ongoing management and maintenance model you want to offer. Provide a way for users to submit requests, and provide input and suggestions. Define the governance model you will need to process and approve requests, and plan for an internal and/or external maintenance team that can execute on those changes.

You don’t need to do all of the items on this list, or the five steps mentioned in my previous post, to be successful.  However the more you do, the greater your likelihood for success. At the end of the day any enterprise system implementation, whether cloud-based or not, represents a significant investment. You don’t want to get 6 or 12 months in and end up with a system that no one is using. Put some thought up front into what you will do to drive adoption, and weave those efforts throughout the life-cycle of your deployment.

Beth Chmielowski helps lead the user adoption and cloud training practice at Appirio. She has more than 14 years experience in the high tech industry defining and building programs that increase customer success. bethc@appirio.com, @bethchm

10 Ways to Drive Cloud Adoption: It’s Not Just Training (Part 1)

Beth Chmielowski

Cloud technologies can simplify your life - from infrastructure set up to overall maintenance. In fact, SaaS applications can be so easy to implement and use, it’s easy to underestimate what it takes to get the breadth and depth of user adoption that defines a successful implementation. As cloud technologies mature and take greater hold throughout organizations, our cloud experts get a lot of questions from customers and prospects on how to make their investments take hold.

To help answer this, we put together a list of 10 things you can do to drive user adoption of cloud technology. Here are the first five in this two-part blog series.

• Paint the Vision, the Roadmap, and the Realm of Possibilities: Often with enterprise systems, getting it right can take time. There are likely a bunch of other systems that need to play nicely, there may be significant process changes introduced, and in some cases it may feel like you have to take a step backwards before you can take two steps forward. People will be forgiving of growing pains if they believe there is a brighter future on the horizon, which means you have to communicate a vision, a roadmap and what’s possible in the long-run.
• Vision : Describe what the end state looks like and why it matters to the company, to an organization, and to the user. Being realistic about what’s possible (or not possible) and how we’ll get there makes it easier for people to get on board. Convince the actual users why this choice and investment is the right one.
• Roadmap: Define what the journey to that end state looks like, and the expected stops along the way (phases and releases). Because an enterprise system typically touches multiple organizations and roles, there may be multiple goals that need to be prioritized or conflicting expectations that need to be balanced. The first go live may feel less robust than the legacy system, but if users know it’s just a foundation and that capabilities will improve over future releases, they will be more tolerant.
• Possibilities: Set the expectation that nothing is set in stone. Vision, timing and priorities are important but you should also be clear that these may change. The amazing thing about cloud-based systems is that new things are possible all the time. The horizon that you may have set your sights on initially suddenly becomes even more expansive than you could have imagined. That’s the true ROI of the cloud: it enables business innovation and boldness.

• Configure for Results First, Then Process: You bought the system for a reason. What is it? What are the business goals that justified the investment in the first place and how will you know if you have achieved them? Understanding what data you need to get out of a system to inform business decisions and measure business results may take time, but it can have a profound impact on the configuration, and subsequently on the adoption of the technology. For example, when configuring a sales process in a CRM tool, it’s not just about replicating business as usual in the new interface or even streamlining the process based on the new tool’s capabilities. It is about defining the desired outcome and what sales metrics matter (such as pipeline by stage, accounts converted from prospect to customer, etc), and ensuring the data that informs these metrics gets captured in the process. Always start with the output the business hopes to achieve and transform existing data and process to meet the objectives. That is, define the level of detail you need to get to, ensure the data is collected, and make the process as easy as possible for the users.

• Provide a Stellar User Experience: No one had to convince me or train me to use my iPhone; I can’t keep my hands off it. While I know my iPhone is a personal tool and a significantly different use case from an enterprise system that requires consistent usage across multiple contributors, it helps make my point. Once you are clear what you need and want people to do with a new system, there is really no excuse for not making it as easy and as pleasant an experience as possible to do it. The more you elevate the user experience, the more you lower the urgency and required effort for everything else on this list.

• Ensure Executive Branding: Executive branding is more than just executive sponsorship. Sponsorship is about signing checks and providing sign-off. Branding is about advocating for change and jump starting it with the cache of a business leader. I have a lot of respect for my leadership team, and if any one of them stood up at a company meeting to introduce something new and ask me to accept it as a strategic priority, I would be predisposed to get on board. Even if it added work to my plate or introduced a state of ambiguity for a while, I would give it the benefit of the doubt and make some allowances for false starts because someone I respect asked me to.

• Balance Obligation with Reason and Buy-In: Obligation means there is limited choice in the matter. We are obliged to follow the speed limit. We are obliged to deal with increased security at airports. However, obligation is more powerful when it is not just mandated, but when you comprehend the need for it. For example, Sept 11 was a compelling reason to tolerate increased airport security. But sometimes that’s not enough. Seeing the need for something may compel me to do it, but it won’t make me happy about it. Buy-in, on the other hand, leads me to want to do it. Getting people to want to do something is largely a factor of the user experience and executive branding delivered in conjunction with a comprehensive understanding of and belief in the vision, roadmap, and possibilities described above.

These are the first five ways that companies can increase the adoption of their cloud investments, and are all critical to consider in the planning and strategy phase of a new implementation. But don’t forget that adoption ultimately comes down to the people that have to use the system. In the next blog in this series, I’ll cover how you can focus on the “user” in user adoption.

Beth Chmielowski helps lead the user adoption and cloud training practice at Appirio. She has more than 14 years experience in the high tech industry defining and building programs that increase customer success. bethc@appirio.com , @bethchm

Can Do Canines wins Extreme Cloud Makeover -- Nonprofit Edition

By Mark Koenig

Last year we challenged nonprofits to submit for the “Extreme Cloud Makeover-- Nonprofit Edition.” The idea was to provide the staff of one deserving nonprofit with a flexible, effective, cloud-based system that users love. We offered to extend an existing salesforce.com implementation, “extreme makeover” style, using the muscle of multiple Appirians and the power of technology we have developed through hundreds of customer engagements and the CloudSpokes community.

We received more than two dozen heart-felt entries and narrowed them down to three finalists.  Then we asked our employees to choose the winner. Apparently our team has a soft spot for man’s best friend, because they voted Can Do Canines the first Extreme Cloud Makeover winner.

As their name suggests, Can Do Canines is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for people with disabilities by creating mutually beneficial partnerships with specially trained dogs. Their canine companions are trained to assist their clients who have disabilities including mobility, hearing, diabetes, seizures, and autism. The dogs and all necessary training are provided free of charge to those in need.

Today, Can Do Canines relies on FileMaker Pro 5.5 as their main database to store and track information about clients, dogs, donors, volunteers, and vendors. And, like many organizations, they also tracked related information using spreadsheets. Having dramatically outgrown their database and spreadsheet tracking capabilities, they needed a new system that would enable them to stop putting effort into keeping all that data up to date an in sync and instead on training the dogs and matching them with people in need.

For the last few weeks, starting just before the holidays, the Appirio team has been hard at work with the Can Do Canines team, designing and building this new cloud-based system from the ground up.  Today, we are on the ground conducting training with the users on their new system. The new system enables Can Do Canines to eliminate the once onerous process of tracking canine medical and training records, client applications, training documents and proper forms. And it moves them to a state-of-the-art technology foundation that affords them the opportunity to steward this information with much more confidence that indeed it will remain safe and secure.

The cloud-based solution is built on salesforce.com using the nonprofit starter pack (NPSP). Additionally, we are using components from the Appirio Cloud Asset Library, as well as CloudWorks, to make it easy for the Can Do Canines team to make the most out of the capabilities of Salesforce to capture and share information about its constituents. In an effort to truly match Can Do Canines needs with appropriate technology solutions, we reached out to Conga (AppExtremes Inc.) - the most popular document generation and reporting solutions for Salesforce - who graciously donated three licenses for three years.

We’re excited to be doing training this week and hope the staff enjoys their move to the cloud. I’m anxious to share how the “silver lining” of cloud computing is helping Can Do Canines achieve results and will share how the new cloud-based system is improving how the organization runs in the next few months. In the meantime, feel free to follow the project on the Silver Lining Facebook page.

Three Ingredients for Improving Open Innovation

By Dave Messinger

Last week, Saugatuck Research published an interesting report, “Mapping, Planning, and Benefiting from Global IT Innovation", recommending that enterprise R&D groups "broaden their 'innovation portfolios' by establishing or expanding innovation investment in areas and locations where innovation is growing - and being rewarded". Looking outside your own company walls might not sound like a new idea, but the following prediction from Saugatuck’s report provides some urgency to take action on the idea.

“By YE2016, the shift by enterprises toward new IT being acquired as Cloud-based, IT-as-a-service will accelerate a shift by most IT providers away from technological innovation as a core value, and toward innovation in technology use, application, and management as a core value.”

The report talks quite a bit about the rise of developing countries, and why innovation centers are increasingly moving outside the United States and Europe. Having a worldwide talent base is critically important, but how we tap into that base, source ideas and enable innovation in our processes makes just as big of a difference.  One of my favorite TED talks is Steven Johnson's"Where Good Ideas Come From" where he describes the power of coffee houses in the 1600s and how new environments like that led to combining ideas and new levels of innovation.

It’s not too different from how we source ideas in our personal lives. Over the holidays I attempt to cook for our family gatherings, which in my case, means relying on recipes from sites like AllRecipes.  Here I can find recipes and comments crowdsourced from people around the world.

Now I know there is no such thing as the perfect recipe to tap new markets and open innovation, but below are a few key ingredients.

1. Collect ideas from both external and internal sources. As Johnson’s TED talk explains, coffee houses led to a great flowering of ideas because it brought together people from all walks of life. At Appirio we use Salesforce’s Ideas platform to track and promote ideas from across the company. It gives anyone in the company the opportunity to directly affect how the company is run. At our regular all-hands meetings we provide an Ideas update on the highest rated ideas, implementation status and a leaderboard for contributors. Companies like Starbucks and Dell use Ideas to source ideas not just inside their company, but from millions of customers worldwide. This isn't too different, then my attempts to cook a holiday turkey. I found more than 200 recipes on how to cook a turkey. The recipe I ultimately used had over 30,000 votes, but the top comment that tweaked the recipe had almost 10,000 votes. Their input resulted (hopefully) in a much tastier meal! 
2. Provide the opportunity for people to contribute and add to your own ideas.  As we build and deploy technology in our organizations, consider the importance of providing an open API or building on public cloud infrastructure as a way to extend the innovation around your existing investments. A great example is how Wolfram|Alpha incorporated the Best Buy Remix API into their search engine just in time for the holidays. This made it possible for any iPhone 4S user to use Apple's Siri to search for electronics powered by Best Buy. Only companies willing to invest in creating open APIs or building on public cloud infrastructures will be able to cost effectively leverage external third parties to enrich and build on their investments. 
3. Invest in a community to implement and improve on ideas. This is one of the toughest things for companies to do well, and one reason why Appirio invested in building CloudSpokes as a neutral community for crowdsourcing worldwide development talent. We’ve built the community to more than 30,000 developers worldwide and use it to supplement our own cloud-focused services, but also see the value in keeping it open to any company who needs to tap into a passionate cloud and mobile focused developer community. The care and feeding of the community is extremely important. You need to reward and recognize their ideas and contributions, whether that’s through monetary rewards, member recommendations, gamification elements like badges or providing access to new ideas and systems that excite them.  

Whether you use CloudSpokes or a different community, make sure it’s filled with people with various perspectives - from different regions, different backgrounds, different levels of expertise. As Jeff Howe mentions in his book Crowdsourcing, never has there been a time where people trust experts less and amateurs more. These days politicians rank just above used cars salesmen in terms of trust, and crowdsourcing provides an economic means to capitalize on the intellectual capital of the amateur class.

There’s no question that the most successful companies in the future will be those that can effectively leverage open innovation and worldwide talent. Open idea exchanges, cloud platforms (which are already innovating at great speeds) and open APIs combined with crowdsourcing communities can be a great starting point. Now if I could only crowdsource my cooking skills, my life and my family’s would be so much better!